


Tokens of affection

by orphan_account



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Good job Kitty, first kill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 06:16:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6273076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The kitty has proved herself as a troll-alarm, but how is she when it comes to hunting? And who to bring her hard-earned prize to, once she has won it?</p><p>Or: Reynir takes his hair down and somebody brings a dead troll into the Tank</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tokens of affection

Reynir wakes up with the most uncomfortable crick in his back. He cannot twist it out within the confines of his bedding, because such a movement would mean putting his foot in Tuuri’s crotch or Mikkel’s face. For a moment he lies there. Reluctant to move. Even more reluctant to consider the massive job he has ahead of him today; he’s going to need to brush his hair out.

It simply has to happen. The combination of stress, strenuous physical activity and harsh polar winds have left him frizzing out the braid this way and that. No matter how many times he crams curls back in or re-does the end, hair still escapes from every direction.  
If there is one thing Reynir cannot handle, it is a mussed braid. Having as much hair as he does can be a real hassle if said hair decides to rebel against his wishes.

So, Reynir decides he might as well take care of both of his problems at once.

He pushes back the blankets and loses a shell of warmth in the process, which makes him groan in regret. Too late to crawl back in now. Carefully, Reynir stands and steps around his team-mates. Or does his best.  
He steps on Emil’s hair, and gets a sleepy Swedish curse flung at him. He trips over Sigrun’s uninjured arm and gets a sleepy Norwegian curse spat at him. Lastly, as usual, he forgets Lalli likes sleeping underneath the bunks and reaches under to paw around for slippers. Instead, he grabs Lalli in the ribs and is scratched lightly for his troubles.

“Sorry.” he whispers each time.

Reynir has said this particular word so many times, the other three know what it means by now. Just as he knows how to say “stop helping” and “stay close, civvie” in Norwegian- probably in Swedish and Danish too, since Tuuri says the languages are like close cousins that keep getting mistaken for being actual siblings because they are so similar. Like her and Lalli.  
When she explained this to him, it was the first time Reynir realised Tuuri had only one brother. He kept this little revelation to himself.

By the time Reynir has ransacked the small closet in the back which serves as a sort of dressing room for a hairbrush, Sigrun is up and flicking the heater on. She talks to herself and possibly the others in her own tongue, cracking her back twice. Reynir, unsatisfied by the first crick he got, copies her. The noise is so loud Sigrun’s head snaps around in alarm.  
He arches his back and points to his spine with a sheepish smile. She responds with an approving, yet smug smile: hers was still better.

“Good morning.” he tries.  
On the off-chance Sigrun might understand the sentiment.

She squints at him with tired, but bright eyes, and grunts something to the affirmative.

Sigrun bustling around and turning on the wheezy heater starts the others stirring. On his way to the door, Reynir watches Emil curl up into a tiny ball under his blanket, like a kitten, or hibernating squirrel. Lalli pushes this ball aside impatiently and crawls out from under his space. He, too, gives his spine a good twist and produces such an impressive crack that Sigrun actually applauds.

Their eyes meet. While he has her attention, Reynir nods towards the door. Seeing the hairbrush in his hands, she grants him permission to open the door with a nod.  
He pulls it open. A wave of cold air whooshes in and prompts a groan from those still packed into their bedding.

Still half-asleep, Mikkel sits up “For satan! Er du sindssyg?”

That makes no sense either. Before Reynir can ask for the Icelandic translation, the Dane’s fallen back into his bedding and pulled it tighter around him, against the cold.  
It occurs to Reynir the others might not be as resilient to the cold as he is. He was, after all, a shepherd, in the days when he was shackled to Iceland’s countryside by his parents’ promise of immediate, painful death if he ever left the country. Shepherds brave the cold, the beasts, tough terrains and deep snows on a daily basis in the winter.

Walking out into a sub-zero morning in slippers and just one jacket is nothing new to him. Out of sympathy for the others’ pain, he closes the door, and sets about his gargantuan task on the front step.

Un-braiding his hair is not a complex process. He simply undoes the clasp at the tip, runs his fingers through the sections to separate them, gives himself a vigorous, fully-body shake, and he’s ready for the brush. Of course, his hair is always a little recalcitrant. It feels wounded to have been packed into a braid, instead of being allowed to flow about him in the artic winds, like a cloud of blood in the water, or a small red storm system centralised around his face and shoulders.

Once he has shaken his hair out, Reynir assesses the damage from a reflection in the hull of the tank.

“Whew!” he exclaims “I look like kitty when she gets spooked!”

A second later Emil opens the door to put the cat out, and confirms Reynir’s opinion by cracking up.

“I know, I know.” says Reynir with an air of suffering “It’s hard to have good hair, huh?”

Somehow, Emil understands enough to nod sympathetically. His hair does look fantastic in the weak dawn, tangled and bed-headed as he is.  
Reynir doesn’t get how he can look so good. He hasn’t noticed much in the way of maintenance apart from the occasionally smoothing-down of the stray wisps, so what is his secret? Is it just something in the Swedish genes? Whatever it is, Reynir is totally jealous.

“Good morning kitty,” he croons after his colleague has retreated inside “How are you today, apart from wonderful? Are you a good kitty? Yes you are. Of course you are. The best kitty, right?”

She sticks out a pink triangle of tongue and him and crawls underneath the tank.

Tuuri comes out a moment later, wrapped in a sweater and bearing a steaming mug.

“Want a sip- whoa, Reynir, your hair. It’s so nice.”

He is mid-way through undoing the biggest, most obnoxious knot when he says this. A piece of hair is slung over his knee, his elbow spread over it so he does not feel the brush wrenching at him all the way to his roots, and has a comb-tooth caught stubbornly in the offending knot.

He speaks through clenched teeth “Nice? Nice is a word for it, I guess. Evil might be a better word.”

“It’s so red! I never realised how red it is. Redder than Sigrun’s, even.”  
Tuuri plops herself down on the other end of the front step, leaving him enough room to grapple with his hair in peace. 

“Did you see where the kitty went?”

“She’s under the tank.”

Tuuri leans back into the tank and calls, still in Icelandic “She’s under the tank!” then she turns back to Reynir “Did you sleep alright? I thought I heard someone having a nightmare last night.”

“Uh…hmm…oh! Oh, no, no, that was me, but I wasn’t having a nightmare. I turned over and got kind of stuck in my blanket? I couldn’t really move and I didn’t want to try wriggling out in case I kicked someone in the head.”

She takes a swig of the steaming drink, and pulls a face that suggests she wishes she hadn’t “That’s thoughtful of you. Bearing the discomfort instead of kicking someone in the head.”

“I hope so.”

As if in agreement, there is a raspy peep from underneath the tank. Reynir never thought a peep could sound evil or guttural, but this peep is definitely both of those things. It raises the hair on the back of his neck and sets his teeth on edge. Tuuri shivers too, and they stare at each other in a sort of paralysed confusion for a few seconds.

Undoubtedly a troll noise. A miniature troll. But how could there be a troll underneath the tank? They are so far out from the city, it would mean the troll going well out of its way to track them down, or clinging to the underside of the tank for kilometres and kilometres. Considering the last dozen or so have been over the steepest ruins the tank has ever had to drive through, Reynir doubts it.

It then occurs to him to fear for his life.  
That was a troll peep.

Before Reynir can collect himself enough to scream and run away, he is literally lifted off of his feet by the collar and tugged back into the tank. Mikkel pops the mask over his head and nudges him into the depths of the tank with a gentle bump from his shoulder, then plucks Tuuri from the steps and does the same to her.

“Stay in here,” he orders in Icelandic.

“Vad?” asks Emil, drawing his knife already.

Mikkel says something different in his own language and gestures for Emil to come with him.

“What’s going on?” asks Reynir nervously.

Tuuri shrugs “Mikkel and Emil are checking the tank, I guess. Lalli!” she switches into Finnish to deliver her order, which her cousin must be ignoring completely, because he doesn’t so much as twitch a muscle.

Sigrun, on the other hand, flies from the tank so quickly after them she nearly bowls Emil right over, and only misses doing so because of a strange sort of mid-air pirouette she does as she leaps from the steps.  
Barking in Norwegian, Sigrun begins to scan the snow, struggling into her coat at the same time.

Reynir’s heart climbs into his mouth “This isn’t good, is it?”

“Probably not,” concedes Tuuri “But not that bad? Mikkel didn’t make us put on our masks, so it can’t be -”

She is interrupted by a deep hiss from where her cousin lies. They look back to see Lalli is crouched on top of the control panel in the cockpit. His hair looks a little prickly and his eyes have grown so wide, Reynir imagines he could read into the pupils and poke his index finger all the way in before he started to touch the sides.

“What?” asks Tuuri- Reynir knows that much Finnish, because Tuuri constantly has to ask Lalli what he’s doing.

His response is more of a growl.

Tuuri looks out the door nervously.  
And in trots the kitty.

Something small swings from her jaws. The thing is the red of rotted raw meat and showers droplets of blood in the cat’s wake. The weight of her kill has nearly tipped her off balance, and her backlegs have to make a serious effort to stay in the ground.  
But the pride in her clumsy swagger is unmistakable. She trots right over to Reynir and drops her prize at his feet.

They look at each other for a long moment. She raises a bloody paw to her mouth and begins to lick the blood away, which must be foul, going by the way her snout furrows.

“Is this for me?” asks Reynir.

Lalli hisses again.

“Oh my gods. Reynir, don’t touch that thing!”

Crouching at a respectful distance, Reynir watches the kitty licking her paws “Thanks so much, Kitty. It’s really nice. I don’t think I can eat it, though. But you’re a smart girl. You know that, right?”

Lalli mutters something. For some reason, Tuuri feels the need to translate.

“He says you’re crazy.”

“So you brought it to me to show your affection! Don’t worry, I get it! The dogs back at home used to bring me sticks and things. Nothing they killed, so this is even better. Oh, I bet this is your first kill, isn’t it? What a smart girl!”

“Lalli says you need to stop cooing at that psychopath.”

Reynir reaches out and pats the top of the cat’s head. Purring, she arches her back and paces back and forth underneath his wrist. He is smeared with blood in the process, but has elected not to care, because the moment is easily the most heart-warming moment he has on the long trip since he saw Sigrun trying to teach Emil how to properly stab something, using a hastily made snowman as their attack dummy.

Mikkel appears on the front step “It may be best that you shut the door for the time being….Reynir, what on earth is that disgusting thing?”

He beams “Kitty brought me a gift! I think she must have killed a Rash-infected mouse?”

Mikkel looks at him blankly for a moment.  
Finally, he manages: “Have you no survival instincts?”

“I think it’s really sweet!”

Tuuri tosses a mask at him, which bounces off the side of Reynir’s head and gets stuck in his loose hair.  
“Put this on before you die.”

Sigrun and Emil are either curious or concerned as to why Mikkel is lingering for so long in the tank. When he points out the tiny dollop of dead troll on the ground, Sigrun’s face lights up as Emil’s crumples. He clasps a hand over his mouth and edges away from the tank- apparently offended that someone brought a thimble-full of dead-troll into his living space, even though Reynir knows he has been literally slopped with troll gunk before. On top of his perfect hair, no less.

While Sigrun pets the cat and coos at her in Norwegian, Mikkel gets the dustpan out of the closet where they keep both the medical supplies and the janitorial equipment (sometimes one in the same), sweeps the offending object in the dustpan and tossing it out into the snow.  
Evidently, he throws the mouse a little too close to Emil, because there is a high-pitched yelp from the exterior, which is quickly followed by some indignant Swedish. Lalli finally relaxes enough to allow himself to be coaxed down from the controls. He scurries through the hall, bounding over the blood spot and out into the snow. Barefoot.

The kitty gives no sign of being offended that her gift has been so callously discarded or grossed out the other, larger cat in the tank so much. Her downy head turns in the direction Lalli ran. It may be Reynir's imagination, but it kind of looks like the cat is enjoying the disturbance she has created for the mage. She wraps herself around Mikkel’s legs and purrs loudly until Mikkel stoops and picks her up. 

“Alright, alright,” he concedes, still in Icelandic for Reynir’s benefit “You did a very good job.”

Sigrun turns to Mikkel, smiling, and says something while nodding her head to Reynir.

“Sigrun says you have beautiful hair, but it is also a death risk and you should probably get it back into that braid. Excuse me. I have to clean this cat before it contaminates the entire tank.”

Mikkel digs a washcloth out of the closet and leaves the tank, with the kitty peeping out of one of his pockets. Her eyes are still narrowed in the smug satisfaction of a predator, realising their predatory destiny for the first time.

Reynir smiles. Today will be a good day.


End file.
